I recently led a team excavating at one of the most iconic archaeological locations in Southeast Asia, Niah Caves in Malaysia. Over a period of three weeks, we dug through what we believe to be around 20,000 years of human history. We uncovered several human bones, the remains of large mammals (probably deer and wild…

This is an article from Curious Kids, a new series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! Where did the first person come from? – Maeve, age 8, Adelaide. What an awesome question, Maeve! It’s one…

Twelve thousand years ago everybody lived as hunters and gatherers. But by 5,000 years ago most people lived as farmers. This brief period marked the biggest shift ever in human history with unparalleled changes in diet, culture and technology, as well as social, economic and political organisation, and even the patterns of disease people suffered….

Geneticists have now firmly established that roughly two percent of the DNA of all living non-African people comes from our Neanderthal cousins. It’s difficult to imagine why our early ancestors would have mated with them. Neanderthals were a different species to us after all, and the thought of it seems distasteful to us today. Hindsight…

Charles Darwin believed that humans evolved in Africa, because that’s where our closest ape relatives the chimpanzees and gorillas live. And during the twentieth century he was vindicated through a combination of fossil and genetic discoveries. While our place in the tree of life is now well established – chimpanzees being our closest relatives –…

We all know that the human brain is ridiculously large, but how many of us realise that it’s lopsided as well? It turns out that the cockeyed shape of our brains is as important to understanding human evolution as its size is. The brain’s lopsidedness is most evident through our hand preferences. Roughly nine out…

It’s been the scientific equivalent of a never ending soap opera. The pygmy human species Homo floresiensis (aka ‘the Hobbit’), discovered in 2003 in a cave on the island of Flores, has been bogged down in a mire of controversy for almost 15 years. Is it a new human species or just a diseased Homo…